A professional. A vampire who specialized in accidents for assassinations or kidnapping. He fought the eagerness with which he wanted to embrace the idea of a kidnapping. He had to keep to the facts—and the amount of blood in the SUV meant that unless she had gotten immediate and professional emergency care, Mercy was in serious trouble.
He snarled, his lips pulling back from his teeth in helpless fury. She could be dying, and his mate bond could not tell him where she was or how she was. The only thing that kept him from surrendering to the wolf who needed something to kill, to destroy, was that he had not felt her die. She was just gone. He would assume that she was alive and needed him until there was proof that said otherwise.
“Adam,” called Darryl’s strained voice. “You should come here.”
Adam looked through the driver’s-side window and saw the pack gathered around something on the ground on the side of the road. He opened the driver’s-side door and hopped to the ground. As he approached, the wolves—most of them midchange thanks to his wild flare of emotion—backed away from him, and he got a good look at the body on the ground.
He bent his knees and examined Stefan—the single vampire whose scent he’d recognized. The wolf fought to kill their rival, but Adam reined that part of himself in with cold truth. Like him, Stefan had a bond with Mercy. Likely that was what had drawn him here. Maybe Stefan could find Mercy when Adam could not.
And Mercy, not jealousy or rivalry, is what is important.
At that firm reminder, the raging violent spirit inside of him settled. The wolf was a hunter; he understood patience. And even the wolf could not doubt that his Mercy was his. Jealousy had no place between them. Terror for her safety, yes. But not jealousy.
Stefan’s eyes opened and, for a moment, they were empty of personality, the eyes of a dead man. Then his face filled with expression, and Adam saw the mirror of his own rage and fear. The vampire exploded to his feet, turning in a circle to take in the wolves who surrounded him.
Adam rose more slowly. Stefan wasn’t going to hurt him, and it would do no harm under the circumstances to keep his own movements under control. The wolf wasn’t fighting him, but the beast was a cunning enemy, and if he had misread the wolf, Adam didn’t want Stefan paying the price.
Not when he could be the key to finding Mercy.
“Mercy?” Stefan asked Adam.
“Gone,” Adam said, fighting down despair. It wasn’t time for that yet. But if Stefan had to ask the question, then his blood bond with Mercy was doing him no more good than Adam’s own mating bond.
He gave the vampire the information he had. “They hit her car and took her. It looks well planned and professional at this point. They are vampires—and not Marsilia’s vampires.” He paused. “I’ve never heard of a professional team of kidnappers or assassins who were vampires.”
“There are some, but they keep a low profile.” Stefan rubbed his face with brisk hands, more as if something about it troubled him than a simple gesture of weariness.
“I felt the wreck,” he told Adam. “I imagine you did, too?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I came to this place immediately and found them already working to get her out of the SUV.”
Stefan could teleport—a quirk of the magic that allowed a dead man to live. The Marrok’s son Charles kept a database of vampires and their abilities. He’d told Adam that teleportation was rare. That both Stefan and Marsilia could do it might indicate that they were Made by the same vampire or vampires of the same lineage. Or not.
The vampire continued to speak. “I was focused on Mercy, or else I might have thought to look for more of the enemy. I jumped in to defend her, and someone caught me from behind with a jumped-up Taser, I think, given the results.” He rubbed his face again.
“Can you tell where she is?” Adam asked tersely, though he was pretty sure of the answer. If Adam could teleport, and he had a clear signal to where Mercy was, he wouldn’t be hanging around talking. He expected that Stefan felt the same.
The vampire raised his chin and closed his eyes, a sign of the trust he had that the wolves would not attack while he left himself vulnerable—or that he thought he could defend himself without watching his foe. Maybe some combination of the two. Though he didn’t need to, the vampire took a deep breath.
When he opened his eyes, he met Adam’s gaze with a bleak expression. “No,” he said. “I can’t feel her at all.”
“Do you know who took her?” Adam asked.
Stefan shook his head. “Vampires, but they weren’t anyone I’ve seen before. Not local.”
“What kind of vehicle did they drive?” asked Darryl.
“They had a helicopter,” Stefan said.
The wolf remembered hearing a helicopter, though Adam hadn’t paid much attention at the time. Helicopters had become less notable the past few months because the cherry farmers employed them during and after rainstorms to help dry the cherries before the rain caused the fruit to swell and split. Cherry season was just over, and in a month or two, he’d have noticed a helicopter.
“I heard it,” said Warren, who had taken his own look around the wreck. “But I only caught a glimpse of it while I was running here. They were flying without lights, boss. They were headed south, but they didn’t land before the sound of the helicopter was too faint for me to hear.”
No telling where the helicopter had been going, then. It could be five miles away or a hundred. The semi was probably stolen, but a helicopter and a team of professionals meant that someone had paid a lot of money to take his mate.